Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  Barrage balloons floated above the buildings, the skyline still intact. The balloons made the world strange and fantastic, a place I did not quite know, a memory, a vision. I watched them and gripped the rail. In my mind I was a traveller, I loved always to be away, but my body was a landlubber’s, easily frightened, unsteady.

  We reached open waters and the wind tore through my coat and beneath my clothes. The other passengers drifted indoors and I watched the wide wake spreading at the stern, beyond it the long ships of the rear convoy, our companions until Africa, a reminder of the silent vessels beneath the grey water, surfacing at night, unseen. The line of England disappeared into the sea and the curfew sounded. We were to be inside at dusk for the blackout.

  That dark ship, the juddering of the torch as I staggered towards the bathroom, slapping about for the wall. Jill had a cast-iron stomach, a flinty, unwavering humour, but her children were as mortal and queasy as I was. One night I woke, stomach turning over, eyes wide open. On the bunk opposite me Henry peered out of the darkness of his fringe, an eye glinting. His hand reached to the edge of the bunk and I was out of bed in an instant, feet knowing their way to the door. As I stepped inside the bathroom I heard him behind me, unsealing the heavy metal door of the cabin. He must wait now. I had no choice.

  Those first nights at sea were wretched and long. I leaned against the wall in the foul bathroom. I thought of Mother in the cellar with her flask of tea, wondered whether she had removed the extra chair and mug now. I imagined her in the torchlight, the blanket over her knees, singing, though perhaps, I saw now, she had done that only for my benefit.

  Our cases were packed and fastened, sitting neatly under our bunks. The night before we were to arrive in Sydney, I lay with my face to the metal wall of the cabin, listening to those who did not intend to sleep that night. There was a timbre to the calls of drunken people. Even the women released deep lowing sounds that might have come out of the jungle, monkey-like cackles.

  My hand on the metal, I thought: This is what we must do today. As soon as our shoes touch Australian soil we must find some means of transport—be it bicycle, train or horse and cart—and reach the camp as soon as possible. I had a vision of a desert, with sand dunes, a barbed-wire fence and army huts at the end of a long, straight road. In the scheme of things, the wild place of my imaginings was tantalisingly close now. These last few hundred miles must be erased like the rest.

  The sea rocked me to sleep as the calls on deck grew sparse and half-hearted. I did not feel that I had slept. A moment later, it seemed, an announcement on the ship’s public address system was waking me again and the children were tumbling out of their beds, high-pitched and excitable, Polly wanting to find a friend she had made up on deck. Jill shushed them sharply, removing her night shades. The voice on the tannoy was the captain’s; we were level with Botany Bay. I thought of convict gangs in chains in a half-made colony.

  Along with the rest of the ship, we rushed up onto the deck, buttoning our clothes as we went. The children stuck with me, surging up the stairs, bobbing along with the crowd. Out onto the deck we all poured. After eight weeks at sea we were to walk on land again. I saw it through the crowd amassing at the rail: the dark forests above the cliffs. Cast myself through the thicket and beyond to the desert, to this place, Hay, where Emil was held. How did they treat Germans? Did they beat them or degrade them? I saw his body, thin and unloved. Ribs and shoulder blades, shirt hanging.

  I made my way through to the rail with the children, Jill arriving beside us, hair combed and pinned, lipstick done. My arms were brown in the pink light, hair grown to my shoulders. A man lifted a pyjama-clad boy above the railing to see the distant houses clustered around the wide basin of Botany Bay, and then the long sun-bright strips of sandstone cliff and beach as we steamed north for the harbour. A refugee family nudged each other and laughed forlornly.

  There was a shining white lighthouse perched high on a long finger of land, its lantern a small halo in the early sun, and then we were rounding the headland into the arms of the town, an English town, somehow, with solid houses, grassed slopes, fields. I recognised it, after the foreignness of Africa and Asia. But yet it was so far, so bright and blue and yellow and grey-green. It gleamed, Sydney, even in the dawn. The light hit water and windows and the tree trunks were pink beneath the dark foliage. And London, far behind us in another life, seemed a place of squeezed-together streets, red brick, dark roofs. The buses and hackney cabs inching through in the rain, the people huddled beneath the awnings of the markets in the squares, the whole country crouching beneath a low sky.

  The crowd on deck looked quietly at its new home, wondering. The refugees, the homecomers. A pelican flew along beside us for a moment, its great wings casting a shadow that rippled over the surface of the water below. The sac under its beak was something prehistoric. Polly laughed. I stared at the valleys of bungalows, the occasional white mansion perching on the slopes above the glossy water, tried to see into the dense, shady bush, those trees with mad limbs and dripping leaves. He has been here.

  We rounded one more of the thin promontories. A shout from the bow and a rush forward. That immense bridge, spanning the halves of the city, beyond it the water glinting amid dark tentacles of wooded land, trailing into the water. Jill said loudly, ‘These colonials certainly know how to build a bridge!’ A couple of Australian women eyed her for a moment, took in her moneyed glamour. Her height and figure. We slowed, nudged to the left by the little grey tug below, ground noisily past the main quay, under the incredible bridge, and around to the chaos of work and commerce of a smaller side harbour. A crowd gathered at the dock, looking as though they would fall in amid the fishing boats. The sun as we turned fell heavy on our faces. We slowed and the breeze stilled and the moisture in the air penetrated our clothes at once.

  Beyond the spectators a group of men prepared for our arrival, waiting by the side of a line of open-doored trucks with their arms folded: meaty, unflappable wharfies, huge shoulders shining. I gripped the rail and breathed in the warm, steamy air above Sydney—petrol, sweet-smelling plants—burning to be down among the people and getting on with our journey. Even in my eagerness I had that sensation at the back of my neck of encountering a new city: the bustle of the seafront, the horn of the ship, the work that happens around boats and places where they meet the land. The incredible light, the deep gullies of the streets going away from the water.

  A feeling rushed up in me. I wanted to lay my fingers on Emil’s arm and talk to him. But these things must be put aside if I were to keep on. Instead I reminded myself: he has led the way here, prepared the ground. If he has stepped on this earth it is ready and safe.

  We waited for the signal to collect our luggage. Still the gangplank was not down. Along the dock a butcher climbed into a van with a headless pig draped over his shoulder, its forelegs trailing down his back.

  Then the messy, hot business of disembarkation, the filling-in of forms, the crowds about us doing the same, irritable, flustered, the children hungry. A very quietly spoken bureaucrat agreed to telephone the train station for me to ask about the train for Hay, and he murmured so quietly into the mouthpiece amid the mayhem and bustle that it seemed like a dream. Still, he was writing down numbers, and he replaced the receiver very gently as he turned the piece of paper around so that I could read it. The train would leave in the evening and arrive the following afternoon. Whatever would we do all day with our luggage, and the heat, and these fractious children? I found Jill waiting outside the gents’ for Henry. ‘Well, Jill,’ I sighed, ‘we must find some way to amuse the children until this evening. The train doesn’t leave until after six.’

  ‘You mean to go today?’ She towered above me in that dusty hall, her hands on her hips, her thin arms triangles glued to a stick.

  ‘Indeed I do. Surely you are not thinking of delaying? You won’t sleep before you see him, you know.’

  She let out a sigh, never one to conceal ill temper, a c
haracteristic I found almost relaxing. An excess of courtesy leaves me all at sea about a person’s intentions. I made myself stay still and silent for a second rather than push forward or surrender, Jill squinting over my head at the bustling dock. ‘I feel sure I would sleep until Christmas, given the chance. But all right, Hannah. It’s a ghastly town.’

  We made arrangements to leave our cases and headed out into the tropical heat. I had never known anything like it, so wet, so heavy, as though one were deep in a rainforest, and yet the miraculous blue sky was endless. As we stepped out onto the street a couple of scruffy boys tore past us, nearly knocking Jill to the ground. Laughing, lusty little tearaways, their skin as tanned as aged wood, their heads shaved for lice, the city their garden. A passing wharfie took in a voluptuous gulp of Jill as she smoothed her dress and hair. We decided on a walk around the streets above the harbour, hoping to find a shady café. Perhaps we thought we were in Spain or Italy.

  We pushed our stiff limbs, still clad in ship clothes, up towards the span of the great steel bridge, amid the sandstone buildings and palm trees, numb with exhaustion. The children skipped and laughed, whispered and ducked down side streets. My God, I thought. If you get lost, how should we ever find you? The glinting harbour flashed down an alleyway between two rows of lovely but peeling terraced houses, jacarandas bursting from the tiny gardens. Three children, then five then four, dashed in and out of a cobbled yard through a pair of wide, propped-open wooden shutters. Their mother, picking lemons, wore a loose button-through dress covered in tiny pale yellow flowers. Her hair greyed prematurely at her smooth temple. I remember her so clearly, there she is, that astonishing sky above the lemon tree, the chaos of her children doing nothing to interrupt her calm. Perhaps I remember her because the sight of her soothed me. This ordinary woman was entirely at home here, even if we were not. I felt compelled to ask her if we could buy lemonade from her, and she smiled, and her children sprang into action, while Jill whispered my name crossly at my back. The woman sat us down on an iron bench beneath what I later learned was a passionfruit vine, and the children produced lemonade in a huge tin jug. Polly and Henry hung back, staring at them from behind the meagre covering of their own mother, but guzzling the lemonade that was handed to them, their hot little faces wide-eyed and stern. The drink was sweet and fresh. My mind was crammed with colour. Oh, I thought, in spite of everything, as the cool liquid slipped down. I could live here.

  We were all briefly in better moods afterwards. We wandered out into the alley, the woman having refused our money, and saw the sparkling blue of the harbour at the bottom of the hill. Fantastic birds swooped and warbled among the palm trees, frangipanis, jacarandas and eucalypts spilling over the walls of the courtyards. Could Jill really find this town ghastly? It was true that smoke belched from unseen chimneys below and gave off a bitter smell, and the harbour was rowdy with foghorns and traffic clattering over the bridge, but it was all so bright and chaotically gorgeous: a new world, far from the troubles of Europe on the face of things. The light as the day swelled into itself, filled its sails. And these people, working people, living among this loveliness.

  Whatever Jill might say, she and the children were as curious as I was. That first day in Australia, we could not stop moving, after our months at sea. We walked, and walked, and even indulged the children with a tram ride. Afterwards, they jumped back down onto the hot road; it was the first time I had seen them laugh in weeks. We peered carefully at everything, under this incredible light. You could almost imagine released convicts living in the sandstone cottages, but then on Pitt Street the lunchtime crowd of office workers, stepping on and off the trams and into their offices, were smart and modern, especially the women. They looked quite American, with tilted hats and long sharply cut skirts. The men dressed exactly alike; suit trousers and no jacket, white shirt open at the collar, dark hat, many smoking, pushing steadily towards their destination. There was constant movement about us but no hurry.

  We turned a corner and all was quiet, the streets wide and empty, a lone slow elderly lady hauling shopping baskets over a crossroads in such a stretched-out instant that it seemed one had to be part of a different order of time to see her move, like watching a sunflower open in the morning or turn its head in a field with a thousand others through the day. We stopped at the corner for a moment, deciding where to head next, and as we did I experienced one of those alterations in sense that one has with little sleep in a new place—just as I felt when I stepped out of the station in a new city: Cologne, Stockholm, Lyon—where the world was a performance playing out in front of me against a painted set. The sandstone offices and the town hall, the stray figures on the street, etched in light and shade, delivering some meaning that I could not grasp, forcing me against myself, to be still, to wait, and then we were off again, the streetscape moving by, and I at last felt dizzy with tiredness and hunger.

  Somehow, eventually, we had passed our first day on Australian soil. Finally, we collapsed into a taxi, collected our cases and made our way to the train station. Hauling my luggage up onto the train, the sky at last losing its blinding colour, I gazed out at the fan of train tracks, the long shelters, the sober faces on the platforms. I had the strength left only to notice that there was still salt on my lips, as though I stood at the prow of the Largs Bay, spray wetting my face. It took a moment to realise that it was not sea water but the salt of my own skin, gathered there from my first day in the Australian heat.

  On the reddish-brown horizon, a road shimmering into eternity, there appeared a line of trees like a city skyline, how one imagined New York or Chicago, such a vision incompatible with this wild place. We passed farm buildings, ancient and mysterious open rusting barns with roofs set upon iron poles so that, beyond the silhouette of farming machinery, one could see yet more of the red plain. Then we were passing a tiny town and its single broad baking street, awnings covering shade that would swallow you whole. A couple of sombre men in dark hats emerged from the shade, slowly crossing the road as though to the reading of a will. A farm lorry passed by after them, children on the back waving from the flatbed, a dog barking, dust flying. They were all freckles and pale red hair. I thought of Steinbeck novels and bone-crushing poverty, though the children were plump and laughing, as well-fed and lively as any I had seen.

  I leaned back against the hot seat and closed my eyes. My coolest memory drank me up: the plunge into the millrace on the morning he went away. I dwelled for as long as possible in the cool water, his arm across my back, the warmth of our bodies where they pressed against one another. I was drawing ever closer to his face, his body, his strong square hands.

  There was yet more though of the plains, the vast upside-down bowl of the sky. And then we came at last past the town with its silver rod of briefly metalled road, the dreary grid of clapboard houses on short stilts, whole dusty blocks of empty lots.

  We eased our stiff bodies out of the train and onto the platform. Beyond the station, out where the road disintegrated to red earth once more, at the hazy, liquid edge of vision, high guard towers loomed. A barrier fell like a guillotine between the road and the buildings: a wall of barbed wire. We stopped where we were on the empty platform. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Jill said quietly.

  For once I could not speak.

  Jill and the children, a mother and her ducks, made for the cool gloom of the waiting room. She was asking the stationmaster about a hotel. I interrupted her. ‘What are you doing?’ I said. I would have shouted it, but for the children.

  ‘Finding a bed, and then lying down on it.’

  ‘But, Jill, they’re right there! We could walk it in minutes. We have come so far.’

  ‘Hannah dear, you should see yourself.’

  ‘Good grief! Who on earth cares? After all this time, we are here.’ I took a breath. I was close to tears with tiredness and confusion. ‘But of course—the children. You’re right. We’ll get settled first.’

  The stationmaster made a telep
hone call and a few minutes later a van came down the desolate street and threw up dust outside the station. The proprietor of the Commercial Hotel drove us into town, and I tried not to look behind me at the guard towers above the roofs.

  Jill was conciliatory in the room. ‘You may use the bathroom first, Hannah. We shall take all day.’

  I stood in the bath letting brown water pummel my shoulders from a wide metal showerhead, grinding my teeth. Startling, that my body could do this ugly thing of its own volition. As I turned off the shower I heard from the next room the insistent rhythmic squeak of the children jumping on the bed, mad with freedom and sugar, having bolted down a powdery-looking chocolate bar thrust on them by the landlord’s wife.

  My skin was shining in the heat before I had even left the bathroom. One might as well not bother bathing. No matter, I thought. If Jill still does not consider herself presentable I shall walk across town. If I arrive wearing a coating of dust so be it.

  Emil

  HAY, 1940

  Emil sat at the small desk he had made from milk crates beneath the window of the hut, which blasted heat like the open door of a bread oven. The window gave on to a square of corrugated tin, the wall of the hut next door. He was filling in yet another form. They had, it seemed, found a category for men like him, unionists and social democrats, those known to have opposed the Nazis. It was an agony, all these forms—for compensation for their things, of qualifications and experience that might be put to use—with nothing ever to show for it but a stone-cold bureaucratic silence. Hopes raised, hopes dashed. And the talk all the time of what might be possible, rumours that sprang up in the camp like the willy-willies in the dust, whipping around the place, stirring everything up. He couldn’t bear it. He went for walks around the perimeter, scratching his ankles in the scrub, hearing the sounds of the town as he put some distance between himself and the huts: church bells, the daily train. Every now and then the breeze brought him schoolchildren in a yard somewhere amid the houses near the station, the gentle clamour of them speaking all at once. He could not walk for long. The journey had weakened his leg and his chest.